Eusebius of Caesarea · a new plain-English translation from the Greek
1| Let all this be said, then, to establish that nothing has come about without reason or without thought, and that the Word and Providence is God. He it was who ordered that the usefulness of metals should come to the aid of our wants, and who apportioned the nature of gold and bronze and the rest in fitting measure: those for which the need was going to be great and of every kind he ordered to be supplied without stint, while those that serve only for the delight of ornament and for abundance he dispensed both generously and sparingly, in a measure between thrift and bounty.
2| For if the same abundance had been granted to the things made for ornament as well, then the miners, out of greed, would have scorned the gathering of what is useful for farming, for building and for the furnishing of temples, such as iron and bronze, and would have neglected it. But the finding of the metals that serve luxury, gold and silver, is, they say, a greater toil than that of all the other metals, so that the intensity of the toil may be set against the intensity of the desire.
3| And how many other works of divine Providence could one count up, over and above all those it has lavishly given us, as it plainly urges human life toward self-control and every other virtue and leads it away from untimely greed? To trace out the reason of them all is a task greater than human strength. For how could the mind of a perishable and feeble creature attain to exact truth? How could it comprehend the pure will of God as it has been from the beginning?
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